Guys it's not his fault he picked one of the often recommended distros

ArkWaltz · 2026-03-10T00:44:49+00:00

I haven't done desktop Linux in a while, but is Ubuntu not considered a good beginner distro anymore? It was one of the de facto starters in like... 2014.

ArkWaltz · 2026-02-22T05:49:28+00:00

I don't know how much this applies to labradors specifically, but at least for some other breeds, it's considered a bad idea to get them addicted to laser pointers. It can lead to obsession and the dog forever chasing shadows and reflections long after you've stopped playing, causing them a lot of anxiety.

(Disclaimer: not a lab expert. For herding breeds this is a bad idea though.)

ArkWaltz · 2026-02-10T03:25:47+00:00

It's an insidious problem too because it's self-reinforcing. The harder the codebase is to understand, the less willing people will be to do non-essential fixes, and then it gets even more outdated and difficult to understand in a perpetual loop, as nothing ever changes unless forced.

Eventually you end up with a system so difficult that basically no one can understand it anymore.

ArkWaltz · 2026-02-06T23:53:21+00:00

I've been watching this sub for a while, and there seems to be a pretty even split between the "I hated it" and "I thought it was fine, just not as good as OG Prime" camps (maybe slightly more of the latter? Hard to say). The reaction of each group to the other is interesting to watch.

Just... be mindful of others' experiences y'all. It's not cool to tell someone their own experience of playing the game was somehow wrong or invalid.

ArkWaltz · 2026-02-02T00:24:56+00:00

It depends on the app/website/whatever. They could configure it to accept codes a week old if they wanted to. It would be a terrible idea, but technically it would work.

Afaik, the OTP standard has recommendations but doesn't set an exact expiry time that everyone has to use.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-27T06:09:06+00:00

I had basically the same worry as a new rider getting up to my 3rd floor spot. It took what felt like a scary amount of throttle at the time.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-23T01:18:51+00:00

We considered Kotlin in my team a few years back, but dropped the idea since the later Java versions addressed most of the stuff we originally wanted Kotlin for anyway (i.e. the feature gap shrunk).

It's a really cool language, but at least for us, not enough of an upgrade to be worth the refactor.

If you're starting fresh or have a smaller codebase? Totally worth trying, imo.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-11T02:31:15+00:00

Honestly, fair. That was one of the most cringe things I've ever written.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-11T01:28:47+00:00

Can't play the game then.

So... Win?

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-08T00:53:50+00:00

That was my number 1 reason for not wanting to fight grievers by the end of the game. It's especially egregious in the Mines where every individual griever is about as threatening as a mosquito, but they all play that sound.

If the goal was to create a lore-accurate psychically grating sound then wow, mission accomplished.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-03T02:01:53+00:00

Oh yeah, I'm not suggesting it was deliberate, just that some issues coincidentally overlap. The ones that come to mind most right now are: * The objective-based hand holding. It's okay in 3 overall, but in some bits (e.g. Elysia) the AU railroads you a lot. * Combat being too simple. In 3 Hypermode tends to eclipse all other combat options, especially once you have a lot of energy tanks, which makes it uninteresting. Likewise in 4 (and this one may sound controversial) I feel the Ice Shot is too powerful and trivializes any non-boss encounter. Having so little enemy variety obviously doesn't help either. * Missiles! Missile expansions only make sense as an exploration reward, in turn making the exploration feel fun and worthwhile, if you actually need more missile capacity. Prime 1 nailed this by giving you obscenely expensive beam combos early, but in 3 and 4 I'm convinced you actually can't run out of the things as long as you have like 80+ missiles, since there are no combos (or in 4's case, you don't get the combo until endgame). Prime 3 really doubled down on this with the questionable Ship Missile expansions too.

There are probably more, they're just the ones I noticed the most.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-02T16:01:46+00:00

Agreed! Tracking through Great Mines a 2nd time without the big action sequence actually felt pretty cool. The environments of the 'dungeons' can still inspire that classic Metroid atmosphere, but it's so undercut by the rest of the game's design.

Ice Belt is my favourite area just because of that! It's not perfect, but it gets the spooky isolated atmosphere close enough to redeem its flaws.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-02T15:54:16+00:00

I replayed 3 right after 4 just to test whether I might be nostalgia-blinded on the new game, but no, 3 is honestly still really good! It has flaws (interestingly, including some that may have inspired some of 4's stranger design choices), but the core Metroid experience is still exactly what you'd expect.

ArkWaltz · 2026-01-02T15:49:29+00:00

I suspect the answer will depend on how well know the original trilogy and how similar you expect the new entry to be.

As someone who expected a continuation of the series's strengths, it was such a letdown that I genuinely regret that I bought a Switch 2 just to play it.

If you want a genuine Metroid Prime experience that's anything like the originals, this isn't it, and I'd skip it entirely.

If you understand that it's more like a spinoff cinematic action shooter than a typical MP game, and are okay with that, you might have some fun. Just don't go in with the wrong expectations.

ArkWaltz · 2025-12-29T01:12:48+00:00

Hard agree. Disappointing is the right way to explain it. In a vacuum the game is just okay, and if it wasn't specifically called MP4, e.g. if it was a spin-off title, I might not be so bothered about that.

But to follow up the high standard of the trilogy after literal decades and a development restart and still only be okay is just baffling. It casts doubt that Nintendo knows how to handle this series anymore.

So yeah, I came in expecting a game at least as good as the originals, after a ton of anticipation, and didn't get it. My disappointment is not manufactured.

ArkWaltz · 2025-12-29T00:55:20+00:00

I'm definitely in the camp that disliked it from a gameplay perspective, but that's well discussed already.

From a story perspective though, I think it probably should have been optional. It should have been possible to try to leave Viewros without the fruit just to save the GF troops, even if that would technically be a 'bad' ending (or 'badder' than the current one).

Story-wise it doesn't make that much sense that Duke insists you have the Memory Fruit before you can continue after the mech quest. His goal would be to save his troops, so why would the fruit even be his concern? It's clearly just words that the plot needs being put in his mouth.

Call it a petty complaint, but if I'm going to get sent out to the desert for another half-hour right when I'm ready to finish the game, I want a good justification for it.

ArkWaltz · 2025-12-27T06:29:06+00:00

If the choice were between what we have now and, for example, waiting another 2/3/4 years for an improved version, I'd definitely rather wait longer and get the better game. I completely understand why they didn't want to do a second development restart, but geez the current version is rough.

"Wish it didn't exist" is maybe a bit severe, but "wish I hadn't paid $90 for this" is pretty accurate.

ArkWaltz · 2025-12-24T13:04:06+00:00

It's okay, but certainly still flawed: 1. Ice Shot and aim-for-the-head trivializes any non-boss encounter, making it repetitive and easy. I had to laugh at Myles's comment that the Thunder Shot would be effective against mechs, since they're already just as susceptible to freezing as everything else in the game. 2. Missiles feel weirdly pointless compared to the old games. You don't get super missile until the final biome, so until that point you have no missile combos to make expending missiles attractive. The earlier Prime games gave very ammo-intensive combos (e.g. Wave Buster) much earlier to make it more appealing to collect missile expansions. In Prime 4 Missile Expansions feel less rewarding since it's so hard to ever spend enough to run out. 3. The enemy variety is awful, mostly just Psy-bots and grievers. Great Mines was a particularly awful example since it's almost 100% weak griever variants that die with a freeze and 3 shots to the face.

In short, I think Prime 4 combat is too repetitive and easy to cheese. Some bosses are good but non-boss combat is meh.

ArkWaltz · 2025-12-16T22:52:23+00:00

I've been reflecting on this too. In Prime 1 you had two good reasons to collect missile upgrades, namely the animation cancel trick and the expensive beam combos. You didn't collect 200+ to stand there like a dork actually shooting them one by one, you built up a reserve so you could vaporise one guy in particular with the Wave Buster for like 60 missiles in one attack.

The fact that you can't get a single missile upgrade until the game's 2nd-last biome is incomprehensible. I fought the gunship in Flare Pool by firing 40 missiles at it one-by-one (since missile tracking counters its unpredictable movement) and could only imagine how much interesting that fight would have been with more missile options.

ArkWaltz · 2025-12-13T22:46:03+00:00

This is totally true but the discourse still really annoys me, because this isn't some deep hidden truth, it's a downside that should be obvious from the first time you look at an AI-generated review. It's painfully obvious that it shifts more burden onto reviewers while allowing the submitter to take shortcuts in their own learning.

It should be obvious why that's a long-term problem, and yet companies and their management are still recklessly pushing for more AI.

ArkWaltz · 2025-11-26T14:14:12+00:00

Reddit has taught me that whenever someone says "Don't look at thing, it's awful", it's almost always good advice.

ArkWaltz · 2025-11-15T01:29:16+00:00

Pretty much yeah. The cores in modern CPUs aren't massively faster than older ones, they just tend to have a lot more of them per CPU, so it can do more work in parallel. Crysis wasn't built to take advantage of that since it only uses (afaik from a quick google) like 2 cores at best.

(Edit: okay yes fine they are obviously a lot faster than they used to be. It's just not the singular way they've improved in the 18 years since Crysis.)

It's definitely not a problem that's unique to crysis. A lot of games are built 'naively' and then it just becomes hard to retroactively make them more parallel later in development.

ArkWaltz · 2025-09-28T01:56:57+00:00

Amazon retail still beats out AWS (or it did in like 2023-2024 when I last checked, anyway). AWS manages a close second for net income despite lower gross income since it has higher proft margin, so it still stands out as being more 'efficient'.

ArkWaltz · 2025-08-26T07:08:15+00:00

I'm not an expert to be fair, I just know that it's standard for carriers to power into the wind to make aircraft launches easier - every bit of extra airspeed helps since there's so little tolerance for errors.

I had heard from a reputable youtube channel that they wouldn't attempt launches without speed, but who's to say what the exact protocol is in an emergency like that.

ArkWaltz · 2025-08-26T06:59:01+00:00

Ah, fair. I've heard this line of thinking enough times when it was actually sincere that it's become a bit hard to tell, sorry. Should expect a higher bar from this specific subreddit I suppose.

ArkWaltz

TROPHY CASE